NLnet Foundation Selected for Three Horizon Europe Grants
NLnet foundation has been selected for one Cascade Funding and two Pilot programmes. The first is the Open Internet Stack call, this new 10M€ initiative will enable NLnet and its consortium partners to continue the important work it is carrying out with its NGI Zero effort: strengthening the European ecosystem of contributors to the digital commons with financial and practical support. The two Pilots have a more narrow scope, focussing on local-first technologies and software supply chain management respectively. Now that the selection has taken place, the programmes will move forward into the grant agreement preparation stage.
Restack
The Cascade Funding programme called Restack, is designed to retain the strength of the NGI Zero approach of nurturing bottom up innovation by providing small- and medium-sized grants to creators of free and open source technologies, as well as a pipeline of tailored support that strengthen the quality and maturity of their projects. The main novelty within Restack is that a significant amount of targeted effort will be added to wrap the resulting innovation catalog into a coherent stack.
Open Internet Stack
The news was shared at FOSDEM, the annual event that brings together thousands of free and open source software developers in Brussels. The announcement was made by the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology, the Commission's department responsible for the much praised Next Generation Internet initiative. Its new Open Internet Stack builds on that initiative with its aim to foster an open source framework, developed and governed by communities of contributors, that will provide key internet technology components that are to be structured in a stack.
Restack consortium
The consortium behind the Restack initiative is led by NLnet and includes the following European partners: Free Software Foundation Europe (DE), Radically Open Security, HAN University of Applied Sciences (NL), Tolerant Networks (IE), OW2 (FR), Center for the Cultivation of Technology (DE), Association for Progressive Communications (ES), Association Professionnelle Européenne du Logiciel Libre (BE), Commons Caretakers BV (NL), NixOS Foundation (NL), OpenForum Europe (BE), Stichting Edsger Institute (NL), GÉANT (NL), Stichting Nationale Beheersorganisatie Providers (NL).
Pilot programmes
Pilots are larger R&D efforts with a specific and concrete objective and scope. A consortium of organisations receives budget to develop or enhance a specific set of open technologies and to apply these to specific, real-world use cases. The role of NLnet in such pilots is to involve additional parties through open calls, providing grants to free and open source projects which are aligned with the goals of the pilot
Encrypted Local-First Applications
The Encrypted Local-First Applications (ELFA) consortium focuses on developing technologies that operate local first. Meaning that they function on a local computer when it is offline, and yet provide the features of connectivity when linked up to the internet. The consortium will create a free and open source, collaborative and decentralized platform for private workspaces and a secure social network, in the form of an integrated suite of apps. The suite features applications like a document editor, spreadsheet, forms, social network, email client and conference calls that will be easy to use.
The ELFA consortium consists of thirteen organisations including NextGraph (FR), IronCalc (DE), BlockNote (NL), Ananas Teknik AB (SE), Ontola (NL), XWiki (FR), Ura Design (DE), Danube Tech (AT), XRFragments (AT), and NLnet (NL).
CodeSupply
The CodeSupply Pilot aims to deliver tools to manage the software supply chain to address a serious real-world challenge: organizations struggle to manage and secure software supply chains with incorrect, inconsistent, or incomplete information about software. Critical metadata about origin and licenses, vulnerabilities, and project health is scattered across multiple databases, registries, and tools, often presenting conflicting or outdated information. Proprietary options lack transparency in their classification and decision-making processes, providing no reproducibility, traceability, or auditability - essential for organizational trust and regulatory requirements. This fragmentation creates compliance risks, security gaps, and operational inefficiencies that scale exponentially with the complexity of software supply chains.
CodeSupply addresses these challenges by delivering correct, trusted, and verified software metadata, as an open source, federated, and digitally sovereign data catalog, necessary to manage and secure software supply chains. The decentralized distribution of open data democratizes access to valuable datasets, balancing the end-to-end traceability and discoverability of code with organizational autonomy and authority over data assets.
Acknowledgements
Horizon Europe is the key funding programme for research and innovation of the European Union. The Open Internet Stack is an initiative of the European Commission's DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology.
